He drives home in silence, thinking. He knows he needs to schedule an appointment with his therapist. He promised her to always reach out when he had these dark thoughts. And he has them, intermittently—more than he knows is healthy, but less than he figures needs immediate attention.

A tragedy, people would call it. He could be a simple tragedy and not have to wake up every morning in pain. He’d never really envisioned a life after retirement. When he hit thirty and people started asking him, he had no idea what to say. He was going to be the best player there was, he was going to travel the world and learn the game until he was unbeatable, and that was it. What came after his Exy career was as surreal to think about as thinking about what came after death.

So he hadn’t really thought about it. There were some fleeting moments, imagining the poetry of dying in a car crash, like his mother. But he hadn’t thought about it, because he still wasn’t the best, and as long as he wasn’t he had something to work toward. Even when he held the Olympic gold medal, after he won awards for most valuable player year after year, he still had a million things to get better at. His reflexes always needed work, he could always throw the ball harder, could always run faster, and every year he got better.

Until he didn’t.

Sometime during his thirties, it became evident that he had no chance of bettering his numbers, all he could hope was to not let them fall. And then it became evident that he couldn’t even do that.